"But this is all chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They b..."
- Jeffrey Eugenides
"Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling."
"For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn't know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was why we spoke of "yodeling in the..."
"Discussing it later, many of us felt we suffered a mental dislocation at that moment, which only grew worse through the course of the remaining deaths. The prevailing symptom of this state was an inab..."
"I mean, in the end it wasn't up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to use before we're born."
"It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move."
"This whole country's stolen."
"The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn't just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she'd always felt when she was in love. ..."
"The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme b..."
"Given the choice, a yeast cell's ideal state is to be diploid. But if it's in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens?The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little hap..."